Going, Going, Green - September 2008

Green Schools Are a Worthy Challenge

By Peggy Rowland

Within a generation, all students will attend a green school where there’s daylight and views, high indoor air quality, thermal comfort, mold prevention, and excellent acoustics. The money saved from increased energy efficiency in schools will fund additional teachers, computers, or books. Educators won’t want to leave for another school or profession. |
Sound great? The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) and more than 70 trained Green Schools advocates and their teams around the country think so.
The USGBC has started a grassroots movement with the vision that every child will attend a green school within a generation. The nonprofit organization is dedicated to expanding sustainable building practices and has more than 70 regional chapters across the country.
Most regional chapters of USGBC have local Green Schools advocates who work with parents, PTA members, teachers, principals, and anyone who is interested in green schools.
According to Rachel Gutter, Schools Sector manager at USGBC, “There’s an advocacy team near you. We have virtually every region covered, and, if not, [it is] in development.”
“It’s all about starting small at the grassroots level and building up a really powerful campaign. We’re seeing that happen all over the country. It’s incredible, the kinds of things these advocacy teams are doing,” she adds.

What Is a Green School?
Gutter explains that a green school “creates a healthy environment that is conducive to learning while saving energy, resources, and money.”
She also notes that the best green schools find ways to truly integrate sustainability into their curricula, using the school as an interactive hands-on teaching tool.
Annette Stelmack, a Green Schools advocate in Colorado and co-author of Sustainable Residential Interiors (Wiley, 2006), says that green schools “make use of as much natural daylight as possible, maximizing students’ ability to concentrate and stay physically and emotionally healthy while dramatically reducing energy costs and greenhouse emissions.”
The 1999 study by the Heschong Mahone Group, Daylighting in Schools, found a positive correlation between daylighting (from windows or skylights) and better test scores, including a 26 percent faster progression in reading.
Paula Vaughan, a Green Schools advocate and co-director of Sustainable Design Initiative at Perkins + Will in Atlanta, says that she encourages green cleaning in addition to green building.
“It doesn’t make sense to build a healthy green building and use toxic materials to clean it,” Vaughan explains.
Planning for a green school also includes budget discussions—and studies show that a school going green is affordable. The 2006 study Greening America’s Schools, by Gregory Kats, found that green schools cost less than 2 percent more than conventional schools, but provide financial benefits that are 20 times as large. The study also found that green schools use an average of 33 percent less energy than conventional schools.

Getting Involved
Everyone—including parents, teachers, PTA members, principals, and concerned citizens—is a stakeholder in schools and can help make green schools a reality.
Gutter explains, “It takes just one green champion to get a green school built. These champions come from all different places in the process.”
A green school can have its beginning from a simple suggestion of a parent or principal.
“The best time [to get involved] is always right now, or maybe yesterday,” says Gutter, adding that the earlier green elements are instituted within a project, the more successful that project will be and the less money will be spent.
Kelly Meyer, a parent and PTA president of a public school in Malibu, Calif., says there are many simple things that can be done to green an existing school—from using recycled paper to emailing school newsletters instead of printing them.
One project that has been instituted at her children’s school is helping to create trash-free lunches by giving each student a lunch box equipped with a cloth napkin and reusable containers. Parents at her school also helped to abolish the school’s use of Styrofoam lunch trays, which were replaced with recyclable corn-based trays.
Meyer also believes in sustainable fundraising. For example, her school sold reusable shopping bags to parents and used those funds to make an educational film about watershed and the impact of pollution on the Pacific Ocean. She also looks forward to the coming addition of wind and solar power at the school.
To encourage all parents to work for greener schools, Meyer adds,”…It’s really rewarding. It’s really beneficial, and the kids soak it up. And it’s our future. We don’t have a choice.” BC

Peggy Rowland is a freelance writer specializing in the environment and felines. Her daily environmental posts can be read at www.treehuggingfamily.com.

Are you working on a special initiative to help turn your school green? Let us know what you are doing so we can share it with our readers. Send it to Dianne@BaltimoresChild.com, Attn: Schools Got Green.

Green School Steps You Can Take Today
Read the studies about green schools and get more facts at www.buildgreenschools.org.
Raise concerns about greening your child’s school at PTA meetings.
Contact your local Green Schools Advocate to become part of your local advocacy team. You can reach the Baltimore Regional Chapter Green Schools Advocate by sending an email to beverly.eisenberg@verizon.net, or by visiting www.buildgreenschools.org and clicking on Contact at the bottom of the homepage.

Baltimore Regional Green Building Council
The Baltimore Regional Green Building Council (BRGBC) is the local chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), a non-profit organization committed to expanding sustainable building practices. Visit its website, at www.usgbcbalt.org.

Eco-Support for Baltimore City Schools
Just last June, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), as part of its Clean School Bus and Tools for Schools Program, awarded two separate checks totaling $163,600 to the Baltimore City Public School System to reduce pollution in its school buses and to develop a plan to categorize the current environmental conditions of 190 of its school buildings.
Why?
Retrofitting school buses to reduce diesel exhaust helps not only the children who ride in them but also their bus drivers, teachers, families, and communities benefit from cleaner air and reduced exposure to diesel exhaust. In addition, poor indoor air quality (IAQ) can impact the comfort and health of students and staff, which, in turn, can affect concentration, attendance, and student performance. And, if schools fail to respond promptly to poor IAQ, students and staff are at an increased risk for short-term health problems, such as fatigue and nausea, as well as long-term problems such as asthma.
For more on addressing environmental health issues in schools, visit the EPA’s Healthy School Environment Resources page online, at epa.gov/cleanschoolbus/relatedlinks.htm.

Come to the National Healthy Homes Festival
The first National Healthy Homes Festival is taking place Sept. 12-14, at Druid Hill Park in Baltimore. Hosted by the Coalition to End Childhood Lead Poisoning, the Festival will bring together local, state, and national community partners—health, housing, and environmental organizations, local universities, lead and asthma prevention programs, city, state, and federal agencies—to inform and educate families on how to eliminate home-based hazards (such as lead, mold/mildew/moisture, allergens, pests, rodents, improper air ventilation, and structural defects). There will be interactive exhibits, demonstrations, and free health screenings as well as many fun and engaging activities for the whole family, including a variety of healthy food vendors and entertainment.
The Festival precedes the first National Healthy Homes Conference—Building a Framework for Healthy Housing, Sept. 15-17 at the Baltimore Hilton, which is sponsored by HUD, CDC, EPA, the Surgeon General, and the USDA.
For more information, visit the Festival website, at www.leadsafe.org/festival. And, for more information about the 2008 National Healthy Homes Conference, visit www.hud.gov/offices/lead/2008NHHC.cfm.

© Baltimore's Child Inc. September 2008